Currently Reading

I’ve started a few projects… then I just fetal on the couch and fall asleep at 8:30pm.

I feel this growing desperation TO DO SOMETHING. But as always, I have no idea what that is. Do I build my blog out? Do I quit my job? Do I storm the streets? Or get on a plane? Or just cuddle Sophie and lament my fatigue.

As far as I’m concerned the US government has already succumbed to the apocalypse and there’s no saving it, except the passage of time. #jadedAF. I am not entirely as fatalistic as this post seems, but trying to figure out how to go high, when we’re just surrounded by low lifes.

In the meantime, at least today, in this gloomy weather, I’m exercising my escapist tendencies, mostly by embracing the concept of hygge and reading all the books.

I just started Alice: Memoirs of a Barbary Coast Prostitute, winner of the 2015 California Historical Society Book Award. I’m already obsessed and want to go back and do my Ph.d looking at sex workers and their treatment over the course of the last century. The introduction is fascinating, loaded with historical context without being overly and dryly academic. And Alice’s voice is so relevant and conversational, even 100 years later.

“In 1913 the San Francisco Bulletin published a serialized, ghostwritten memoir of a prostitute who went by the moniker Alice Smith. “A Voice from the Underworld” detailed Alice’s humble Midwestern upbringing and her struggle to find aboveboard work, and candidly related the harrowing events she endured after entering “the life.” While prostitute narratives had been published before, never had they been as frank in their discussion of the underworld, including topics such as abortion, police corruption, and the unwritten laws of the brothel. Throughout the series, Alice strongly criticized the society that failed her and so many other women, but, just as acutely, she longed to be welcomed back from the margins.”

I’d also recommend The Suicide of Clare Bishop, a fragmented narrative of a desperately glamorous and melancholy 1950s housewife, and The Red Parts, the non-fiction account of brutal cold case trial 35 years after the murder.